The Anti-Trinitarian Tempting of Christ

First Preface

A year or two ago I subscribed to an online Lenten retreat put together by some Discalced Carmelites in Europe. That particular retreat was based on the writings of Père Jacques, and was well worth the small investment of time.

I didn’t realize that this put me on a perpetual mailing list to receive additional retreat material every Advent and Lent. None of the retreats after that one impressed me as much as the first, but they were still excellent, so I haven’t asked them to remove me from the list. Consider signing up!

A passage in today’s retreat arrested my attention: My thoughts jumped to the Trinity, so I expected them to elaborate on that. They did not, but my mind continued to reflect on it, so I commit here some of the resulting thoughts.

Second Preface

A principle lost in a lot of religious art — not without reason, but still — is that you should fear less the devil you see, as opposed to the devil you don’t. Temptation typically comes in attractive forms, not repugnant ones. Don’t take my word for it; St. Paul himself makes it plain: Because of this, I’d suggest that while reading this Gospel, the reader “de-imagine” images of a horned, hoofed, hairy devil, and imagine instead of someone who resembles a messenger from God.

What would that look like? Think of someone you trust, someone you think has good spiritual insight. Maybe it’s the pope; maybe it’s your pastor; maybe it’s Bishop Barron or Peter Kreeft or Fr. James Martin, SJ; maybe it’s St. Catherine of Siena or maybe it’s Our Lady Herself appear with a spiritual secret just for you — whoever it is, that’s who’s appearing to tempt Christ — and you.

Based on this principle, I’ve taken the image of the devil in the form of a monk, from a painting by Botticelli. Maybe that wasn’t Botticelli’s intent, but it works for me — aside from the somewhat unfortunate wings he threw in. Oh, well.

The First Temptation: to act against the Father

From the Bible’s beginning, God need only “speak” to effect His will. For instance:

Recall that Jesus refers to the God of the Old Testament as “Father”. Jesus is not merely the Son of God in a carnal, mortal sense; He is, as the eternal Word / Reason / Logos (John 1), the only-begotten Son of God in a spiritual, divine sense. By His divinity, Christ can speak a word and effect His will: to wit, the wedding at Cana, or the Eucharist, or the various miracles. He does this in His role as the Father’s Word, making present in time that which the Father has spoken eternally.

But that does not make the Son into the Father, and the Son cannot act without the Father, let alone against the Father — not merely may not act, He cannot act. By tempting Jesus to “command this stone to become a loaf of bread,” Satan asks Jesus to act like the Father, but independently of Him. Christ’s response is that one does not live on bread alone; Luke’s telling stops here, but Matthew adds, “…but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”

This is more than morality: it is, I suggest, Matthew’s way of saying what John conveys in the first chapter of his gospel: we live because God has spoken through His Word in creation. More to the point: were God to fall silent and withold the Word that heretofore came forth from His mouth, we would cease to exist.

Satan tempts us to act as gods, as if we have absolute power over life and death and even over creation itself, without regard to an ethics based on true, self-sacrificing love, and often enough without regard even to reality. When we find reality insufficiently to our liking, we are increasingly likely to fashion a new one, pretending the old one is no longer valid, while shaming and stigmatizing those who insist on it.

The Second Temptation: to act against the Son

Our Lord knows already that

• as Son of God, the Divine Word through Whom the Father created all things, He rightly is King of the World;
• as Son of David through the Virgin Mary, He rightly is destined to rule all nations: Psalm 2⋅8, for instance.

Can Satan be serious here? Is he truly ignorant of our Lord’s nature?

I suggest that yes, he is. He imagines himself to be dealing with “yet another man” that he can corrupt no less easily. He plans to drive a wedge between Jesus and God as he always does with God’s anointed, stoking Saul’s jealousy; David’s infidelity; Solomon’s folly. One could go on. Whatever the case, here Satan tempts our Lord not to receive the Kingdom humbly, as a Son does from His Father, but to seize it pridefully.

Likewise, we are tempted to wield power for the sake of heaven, even at the cost of compromising the Way Christ teaches us. One might consider how many politically active Christians bat not an eye at adultery, avarice, covetousness, envy, false witness, hatred, even idolatry, under the delusion that, having seized power through corrupt means, they will somehow grasp it for ever. It’s all somehow made alright because they have the “right” intentions. As if they haven’t studied the history of Christendom.

The Third Temptation: to act against the Spirit

Satan now tempts the Son of David with words from Psalm 91, which David wrote while in the Spirit. God forgive my lack of good words for this, but I see in it the temptation to an excess of faith: “God is on my side: He will protect me, therefore no evil will befall me, no matter how presumptiously I behave.” It reminds one of numerous instances where God’s followed presume to speak for the Spirit rather than allowing the Spirit to speak through them. Examples abound:

1. The Old Testament is replete with false prophets who ply their trade telling their patrons not what God actually says, but what their listeners already wanted to hear. After all, their patrons enjoy riches and hold power by God’s grace; therefore, God has blessed them, yes? Things turn out badly for them in due course. (Example)
   Christ has made us a nation of priests, prophets, and kings, yet the Church today is no less full of false prophets telling their audience what they want to hear while remaining silent on what they need to hear.

2. For example: When I was a graduate student at Northern Arizona University, an atheist officemate recounted how a religious friend dragged her outside during a rainstorm and started praying that God reveal himself by causing the rain to stop.
   My officemate and her friend returned inside twenty minutes later, cold and wet. The latter wept from despair, convinced the failure was due to her lack of faith.

3. Not long after that, a famous televangelist scolded a Florida city for allowing a Pride parade. God would not be mocked, he warned, adding that he would think twice about that sort of thing if he lived in the path of hurricanes.
   A poor choice of words, perhaps. Not only did the televangelist live in the path of hurricanes: his home city was struck by a record hurricane that year, while not a single hurricane struck the city in question.
   (To be clear, I take St. Agatha’s position on the matter of pride.)

We can’t presume that what God wants us to say is what we want to say. While frequently confused and conflated, faith and folly are worlds apart. Don’t throw yourself from the parapet and expect angels to arrest your fall. True, our Lord triumphs over death — but first, He dies.

Afterword

Well, this was an interesting exercise. I”ll have to think about these thoughts some more. To sum up the exercise:

• I was hungry to write some spiritual words, and commanded the electrons to form an essay;
• I surveyed the whole of today’s reading, and took command of it;
• I threw myself into the exercise, relying on God’s grace to save me from dashing my ideas against the ground of stupidity.

That observation sounds uncomfortably like something I should recognize from somewhere…